U.S. nuclear saber rattling continues without letup. U.S. Strategic Command issued a press release on Nov. 28 reporting that the USS West Virginia, the same nuclear ballistic missile submarine that had taken U.S. Central Command chief Gen. Michael Kurilla on board in the Arabian Sea on Oct. 19, had made a port visit to the British naval base at Diego Garcia on Oct. 25-31. “The visit, part of West Virginia's sustained deterrence operations in the United States Central Command and Indo-Pacific Command areas of responsibility, emphasizes the unmatched capabilities of a ballistic missile submarine to deter and, if necessary, respond from anywhere on the globe,” the release said. Another nuclear ballistic missile submarine, the USS Rhode Island, very publicly sailed into the Royal Navy base in Gibraltar on Nov. 1. Nuclear messaging, anyone?
The submarine also conducted a complete crew exchange in Diego Garcia and a subsequent replenishment at sea, Strategic Command reported. A replenishment at sea is a complex operation that can only be done on the surface, which means that for that time, the submarine is detectable by national technical means, along with the ships involved in servicing it.
This was followed by the news on Nov. 29 that an “elephant walk” exercise had been carried out on Nov. 7 by eight B-2 stealth bombers at their home base in Missouri. An elephant walk is the massed taxiing of a large number of aircraft at the same time as part of a force generation exercise and, depending on the exercise, may or may not include the massed takeoff of those aircraft. In this case, the B-2’s did apparently take off. This seems to be the first time that the flying-wing bombers had been involved in a mass launch of this scale, the War Zone reported.
Stratcom produced a video of the exercise, called Spirit Vigilance 22, which is included in the War Zone report. “We are displaying a capability here to rapidly generate and deploy [the B-2] under greater scrutiny and time restraints than the normal day-to-day flying mission,” said Capt. Richard Collier, 509th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron director of operations, of the Spirit Vigilance exercise. “Here we demonstrate to our near-peer adversaries, as well as to ourselves, how well we can perform.” (https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/behold-40-of-b-2-bomber-fleet-executing-an-elephant-walk )
There are only 20 U.S. B-2 bombers in existence. Note that the bombs that destroyed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, during NATO’s war on Yugoslavia, were dropped by a B-2.
